Pigs CAN Fly

At least they do in China. No genetic engineering involved, just some genuine farmer ingenuity. Airborne porkers aren’t entertainment, or a hoax. Currently, there’s a discussion raging on a popular Chinese website about whether one farmer’s solution is abusive to his animals or not. Some of the comments say it looks like fun to them.

It’s not like Sying P’an is shooting them out of a cannon. They aren’t traveling at high rates of speed, or even flying long distance. Faced with a dilemma, an agricultural engineer must put on his strategy for correction cap and find an appropriate solution. In this case, P’an was simply tired of losing income when his pigs disappeared during transit between his truck and their next step to market. Pigs are smart. They are experts at escape, and once free… catching them is next to impossible.

So, the low budget solution? A pig mover that would put an end to all those piggy get-a-ways.Now he trolleys his pork with a rope and pulley from point A to point B. The pigs naturally do a lot of squealing in flight, but none have been harmed to date. They aren’t inhumanely trussed up, or hanging by their feet. Once the first one in the load completes his flight successfully, he says it’s easy to get the rest of the herd to follow along with the plan. Which is a sign that the squealing is perhaps delight rather than fear. Animals aren’t apt to be agreeable to a situation if one of their kind has just been hurt or terrified and they witnessed it. Humans pay money to be terrified and call it entertaining, so it shouldn’t be such a stretch of the mind to see that the pork on the hoof might find the trip a bit like a roller coaster ride.

P’an says his pigs like it, and it certainly helps his economical situation. Before he came up with the idea to fly them, many was the time that market day was a break even event, and sometimes a loss.

Tammy has been immersed in the world of plants and growing since her first job as an assistant weeder at the tender age of 8. Heavily influenced by a former life as a landscape designer and nursery owner, she swears good looking plants follow her home.